Datives and Other Cases

This volume provides a state-of-the-art account of research into datives and other morphological cases. The contributors, among them leading scholars in the field, present fresh insights into traditional issues such as the dichotomy between lexical and structural case, and open up fascinating new areas of research. A recurrent feature of the majority of contributions is their combined syntax-semantics perspective. Germanic varieties, Serbian, Albanian and other Balkan languages alongside Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog are discussed from various theoretical angles such as mainstream generativism, lexical-functional grammar, and functional typology. Despite the broad range of facts spanning the distance between acquisition data and dialectology, the papers are connected by a renewed interest in form-function correspondencies. This volume will be welcomed by theoretical linguists and typologists with an interest in argument and event structure, linguists studying the case systems of individual languages and researchers in search for up-to-date discussion of Germanic datives.

Vera Lee-Schoenfeld, Swarthmore College, in Studies in Language 32:1, 2008:
This volume is a much-needed overview of the current take on datives from a number of different theoretical perspectives. Datives and Other Cases will certainly appeal to linguists interested in the German dative but also to non-Germanicists who are concerned with finding the right analysis, both syntactic and semantic, of datives in other languages.